Views of distant
scenic places and exotic lands are preserved in the work of a number of
19th-century photographers who traveled incredible distances laden with
the cumbersome equipment of the day to record scenes and people. Francis
Bedford (1816-94) photographed the Middle East in 1860; his compatriot
Samuel Bourne (1834-1912) made about 900 pictures of the Himalaya on three
trips between 1863 and 1866; and Francis Frith (1822-98) worked in Egypt
about 1860. His photographs of sites and monuments (many of which are now
destroyed or dispersed) provide a record still useful to archaeologists,
as do those pictures taken in 1849-51 by the French photographer Maxime
DuCamp (1822-94).
A popular form
of home entertainment in the 19th century was provided by the stereoscope
pictures taken by these traveling photographers, using double-lens cameras.
When viewed through a special holder, these photographs take on a three-dimensional
quality.
With Charles
Bennett's invention of the dry plate negative in 1878, the task of the
traveling view photographer became much less arduous. Instead of having
to develop the plate on the spot, while it was still wet, a photographer
could store the dry plate to be developed elsewhere at a later time.
Interest in such
view photographs has been revived in recent years, and they have been the
subject of several exhibitions and books. Among these are Imperial China:
Photographs 1850-1912 (based on a 1979 exhibition at Asia House Gallery,
New York City); Princely India: Photographs of Raja Deer Lala Dayal,
Court Photographer (1884-1910) to the Premier Prince of India (1980),
edited by Clark Worswick; and Photographs for the Tsar: The Pioneering
Color Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Commissioned
by Tsar Nicholas II (1980). This last publication is a collection of
photographs of czarist Russia between 1909 and 1914, purchased in 1948
by the Library of Congress.
